SEO for WordPress – Optimization, Guidelines, Techniques and Tutorial

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available on the internet right now. Nowadays, more and more people are turning WordPress into a CMS for their business site since WordPress is design to be SEO friendly. Although it is design to be SEO friendly, there are still ways of optimizing your WordPress site. Remember every little optimization contributes to your ranking in the search engine.

WordPress SEO Guide

I have written a detail SEO guideline for beginners that should have covered most of the techniques available to construct a SEO friendly website and it should be greatly applicable in WordPress. The article will be maintained over the time and I believe it should worth to take a look at it. However, the article only cover techniques and guidelines for sites that do not have a well define structure. Therefore, for website build with WordPress that already has a defined structure, there is a need for a clearer guidance on how to target SEO friendly for WordPress only.

WordPress Built-in features

WordPress has many built-in features to help optimize your website. However, many users are not aware of such features and lose out to others who have already uses these feature to optimize their WordPress.

WordPress Permalink

Like I mention in the guide that I wrote, this is a very important thing you should do to optimize the performance of your WordPress. Your URL does contribute to what is being searched on the search engine. So change your permalink to a custom structure as shown below.

setting permalinks in wordpress for seo

Personally I used this format for my website.

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%category%/%postname%/

Most Recent Posts

Since search engine spider go through all your contents, having most recent post helps promote your written article since it appear across the pages you have. You can do this on your template widget option as shown below.

location of recent post widget

Most Important Posts

There are article which you wrote that you wish your reader can always see it. If it is a post, get it sticky on the main page or else placed it on a page instead. A carefully construct keywords post will always be destroy by comments. Placing it in page will last your ranking of that particular page in search engine result.

Update Services

This is a must apply technique in WordPress. This feature is built into WordPress but many beginners never try to update this. You can go to Setting->Writing and you will see ‘Update Services’. You can place the following services that I use but be aware that if you have similar services, it will send two time ping to those services and will get ban for spamming these services.

WordPress Category

Category is an important way of promoting your site to search engine spider. If you category naming is not certain keyword, it will be difficult for search engine spider to crawl out these keywords. Thus, name your category carefully. For example, instead of using SEO, use SEO Blogger or SEO wordpress for your category name instead.

Excerpts and More tag

If you are user who likes to display the whole post on your main page, this is the most important things you must aware of. Having the whole content being display on the main page will definitely cause duplication and get penalize by search engines. Thus, using Excerpts can help eliminate this problem. But if you insist on having your content being display in full, it is best to use the more tag to cut it short with a read more link to the read post. This way you won't be penalize by major search engine.

WordPress Plugin

WordPress plugin play a very important reason why millions of people are currently using WordPress for their CMS instead of other popular CMS such as Joomla or Concrete5. Although it is initially built for blogging purposes but due to all these powerful plugin that had built by its community, WordPress has become a powerful tool for many businesses. However, It is not a good idea to have two similar function plugin activated together. This will cause double work for search engines and more pain for your site.

Sitemap Generator Plugin

Submitting sitemap whenever there is a new article to various big search engines take time. Therefore, having this plugin save your time and constantly alert the search engine to crawl out your content. I would highly recommend Google XML Sitemaps for your plugin.

Online services Plugin

Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button is the plugin that I used for my WordPress to allow my visitor to bookmark valuable article from my site. This helps to promote users to spare the words out of search engine and not only relay on SEO.

Speed up Plugin

You do not want your visitor to wait for your all site to load when they enter your site when there are no changes in your article. This won’t help your site at all. You can use WP Super Cache to help speed up your site.

Related Posts Plugin

Since linking between your site helps spider crawl better and promote your post, having a related post plugin for WordPress is necessary to increase your chances of being indexed in search engine. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is one of the plugin that do the job perfectly and it is well maintained up till now.

Monitor Plugin

This is a very interesting plugin similar to google analytics but provide you with more information on your users. This way you can use these information to update your content and improve your over SEO strategy. StatPress Reloaded or WassUp gives you this ability nicely.

SEO image optimizer plugin

There are times when we forget to add alt or title in our images without these additional information, we tend to lose out in regards to our ranking in search engine. Since spiders cannot read an images, having these elements are important. Thus, with the help of SEO Friendly Images, all images that don’t contain such elements can be easily added without you flipping up all your post.

SEO Broken link plugin

There are many times when your broken links are being indexed by search engines and visitors are unable to view any information and leave quietly. This will hurt your overall quality of your website. Thus, having Redirection will help you fix those broken links by redirect them to the correct ones.

Google Analytics plugin

Webmaster who uses Google analytics will find this plugin very useful especially when you have no idea how to deal with all the codes in your template. Google Analytics for WordPress will save your life.

Update plugin tool

SEO URL Helper plugin

Having unnecessary word in your URL doesn’t really help you in performing better in search result. Try SEO Slugs that remove unnecessary word within your permalinks.

Post control plugin

WP-CMS Post Control helps reduce the size in your WordPress database accumulated by auto save post that can hurt your website performance. Since all of these auto save post resist in your database even if your post has been published.

Updated: 13/04/2009

Social Profilr

Social Profilr is a plugin where you can add a nice graphical icon on your template widget for your visitor to find you and keep updated with you.

Optimize wordpress plugin 13/04/209

There are many useful plugin that provides feature for your wordpress blog. However, many of these plugin are not built with SEO in mind. Therefore, it will be good to notice some of the mistake made by these plugin you used and edit them if necessary. I have wrote a tutorial to teach you a simlpe way that can help you optimize your wordpress plugin.